It is no small thing to see Jesus in those we might be tempted to look past.

It is no small thing to see Jesus in those we might be tempted to look past.

Long before Jesus was condemned by Pontius Pilate and rejected by the authorities, denied by Peter and betrayed by Judas, misunderstood by his followers and chased away by his townspeople, he came onto the scene virtually unnoticed. “There was no room for them in the inn,” Luke reports with understated reserve. Is it not curious that Luke seemingly finds nothing outlandish about the long-awaited messiah’s arrival occasioning practically no response except for one small band of shepherds who were tipped off by a rather singular display of “the glory of the Lord”?

No, Luke is an astute enough chronicler of both the human and the divine to know that God tends to avoid the spotlight and that we are in the habit of alternately overlooking and not looking far enough for God. God, the creator of the universe, became a helpless baby so insignificant and ordinary that not even a single decent room in the inn could be found for him. During the Christmas season, we as a church collectively recall and celebrate that God is often closer and smaller than we think.

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God in My Freezer

Recently, my wife was pregnant with our second child and was due at the same time that we planned to move. Our “new” old house required considerable work before it was ready to be moved into with a toddler and a soon-to-be newborn. Working on the house took us to the brink of exhaustion—and all of this in the lead-up to welcoming home a tiny, sleepless bundle of joy. Many friends came to our aid. One friend brought us a dozen or so pints of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and stashed them in our freezer. Each night, bleary-eyed from long hours of working on the house, my wife and I would gather around ice cream and rehash the day’s progress and size up the next day’s projects.

The cache of ice cream steadily diminished. Yet one evening we opened the freezer and found an as-of-yet undiscovered pint of Ben and Jerry’s. God was in that ice cream. I am certain of it. It was not that the last pint miraculously appeared. Its presence—tucked behind a bag of frozen vegetables—was entirely explicable. Our friend obviously had put it there. But that last pint of ice cream revealed something of the humble means God so characteristically assumes to communicate a bottomless love. Like a secret admirer eager to communicate affection, God employs ingenious creativity in riddling our lives with seemingly unsigned love notes. God seems content to be tucked away in small places not because God does not want to be found but because God is humble enough to wait for us to go looking. My friend with the ice cream showed me what God desperately wanted me to know in those anxious days: My family is loved. If I had been waiting for a thunderbolt from heaven to tell me that, I would have missed the message. God used a far subtler, sweeter means of communication that risked being overlooked altogether as something as ordinary as, well, some extraordinarily delicious ice cream.

St. Ignatius Loyola has a memorable phrase for thinking about God’s presence all around us. Ignatius said, “God labors and works for me in all the creatures on the face of the earth.” His point was that one of the most common ways that God loves us is through other people. We are accustomed to interpreting other people’s words and actions toward us as indicating how they themselves feel about us. Ignatius invites us to see how our daily experiences of receiving love also reveal God’s own deep care for us.

But life is not all about finding hidden pints of ice cream. Another way that God is also “smaller” than we sometimes think is God’s presence in the most marginalized of our brothers and sisters, including those who are hungry, homeless or in prison. In Chapter 25 of the Gospel according to Matthew, we learn that whatever we do—or do not do—to “the least” of those around us, we do—or do not do—to Jesus himself. Matthew suggests that neither those who served others nor those who ignored others realized that it was Jesus they were encountering. Our eyes are not habituated to seeing God in those around us. It takes practice to perceive God in other people, particularly in those the world pushes to the margins. And the conclusion of Matthew 25 points out that it is no small thing to find God in those we might be tempted to look past: our salvation depends on it.

God Outstretched on the Cross

Part of the reason that no room could be found in the inn for Mary, Joseph and Jesus is that God so often slips by unnoticed in the seemingly small and ordinary. But even if the most lavish hospitality had been shown to the infant Jesus and his fatigued parents that night, no accommodations—not even the universe itself—could be roomy enough to enclose the God who had come to earth. God came to dwell among us. We, however, can never domesticate God. We are always right to name an experience as potentially revelatory of God’s presence. And at the same time, God remains beyond our limited human experience and understanding. God was both “in” that surprising last pint of ice cream and is infinitely more than it.

Karl Rahner, a German Jesuit theologian, had a delightful way of talking about this “more-ness” of God. To Father Rahner, God was not an inaccessible, rarified mystery entirely beyond reach. Instead, Father Rahner perceived an unbounded roominess in God such that God is “infinitely knowable.” We can know more and more about God and there is always more and more to know. The multiplicity of Gospel portraits of Jesus and the diversity of images of God throughout Scripture bear witness to this “more-ness” of God. We would do well to frequently revisit lesser-known passages in order to curb the tendency to shrink our image of God to a size and shape that often bears a striking resemblance to our own selves.

We can savor finding God in small moments when we feel surprisingly loved, or in epiphany experiences when we perceive God on the margins where Jesus promised we would find him. Can we also find God in the overwhelming suffering and hardship that exists in our world and in our own lives? God’s “bigness” comes into question when it can seem like he is absent from those places where his presence is most needed.

For more than half a century, Dorothy Day worked, wrote and spoke tirelessly in response to the crushing needs of those living in poverty both near and far. Her own life was frequently marked by feelings of bleakness and depression. Even after becoming a national celebrity and being called upon by Blessed Mother Teresa and Thomas Merton, O.C.S.O., Dorothy Day continued to struggle with feeling unwanted, unloved and unloving. Again and again, she turned to the Eucharist and communal meals to find God’s presence. She famously concludes her autobiography with the lines: “We know Him in the breaking of the bread, and we know each other in the breaking of the bread, and we are not alone anymore.”

Dorothy Day found solace in the Eucharist, which continues to make present the God who, outstretched on the cross, went to the very depths of all that is human out of love for us. The God who was content to arrive almost unnoticed in Bethlehem was lifted up for all to see at Golgotha. She also took comfort in the rhythm of ordinary meals among the poor at the Catholic Worker houses of hospitality because she was familiar with God’s penchant for dealing in the commonplace, the overlooked and the downtrodden. Understandably, we may ask of God, “Where are you when there are so many people suffering?” Might God not also be asking the same question of us? As St. Teresa of Avila says, “Christ has no body but yours, no hands, no feet on earth but yours.”

That ragged assortment of shepherds who “went in haste and found Mary and Joseph, and the infant lying in the manger” could well be the patron saints of the Christmas season. They were humble enough to be overcome with awe at the glory of the Lord that shone around them. And with eyes still burning from the sight of it, they could equally make out God’s tiny, bundled figure in the shadows of the manger. Holy shepherds, pray for us this Christmas that we too might fall in worship surrounded by God’s immeasurable heavenly light and run in haste to find God’s tiniest trace here on earth.

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Bruce Snowden

2 years 2 months ago

Talk about God showing himself in littleness, in unnoticed ways, I was seated on my mobile Walker, outside a doctor’s office waiting for its door to open and happen to look down on the cemented waiting area. There I saw with amazement a microscopically tiny insect, the size of the tip of a pin scampering about. It was hardly visible, yet obviously all mechanisms necessary for life were in working order – respiration, digestion, auditory and visual capacities, blood flow, cardio function, reproductive ability, everything needed to efficiently propagate and sustain the species. It was sunny and I noticed when my shadow fell over the tiny creature it stopped moving and changed direction defensively I surmised. Clearly life-protecting know-how was in working order.
Through that experience I saw God in the person of Jesus saying, “Not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed like one of these …” hardly visible works of my hand, unnoticed. “Creatures big and small praise the Lord!”
The mechanics of his on-going creation in place, God called everything, “Good.” As if to backup that conclusion, Salvation history is replete with examples of God using creation’s goodness as teaching devices, like the Mother Hen in the Gospel with which Jesus identified himself, Jesus identifying with the female form, or the Jordan’s Baptismal Dove, also in the OT, the Lion of Judah. However, the greatest example is the Incarnation, wherein the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity entered the animal kingdom by becoming Man. God’s relationship to his creation is always for the good. The unnoticed God at work, often in surprising ways, even in ice cream, pointed out by Mr. Wilson!
Saints too, have imitated their Lord. Take St. John Bosco, who being followed by killer-thugs because his righteous work with young people, was effectually destroying their existing sexual exploitation of children, tells of a ferocious looking dog that suddenly walked with him along a dark road. The thugs seeing the dog, backed away in fear. The Saint explained later that the dog was his Guardian Angel sent by God protectively.
Similar things may happen to the unsaintly too, like me! Once walking to Mass at the campus where I lived, there on a banister I spotted a Praying Mantis in its usual prayer-like position, kneeling as if in prayer. Feeling dank because of what I like to call “prayer fatigue” which happens during periods of apparently fruitless prayer, seeing the Praying Mantis apparently always at prayer, the following words of Jesus came to mind, “Pray always and do not loose heart.” Immediately my spirit lifted and I recognized Jesus speaking to me in my need, through a humble insect, the work of his hand! Yes, Jesus is an equal opportunity provider cluing all to the workings of the unnoticed God, which he truly is! We all like to be noticed, God too, and paradoxically he does unnoticed things to get noticed!

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This article also appeared in print, under the headline "An Unnoticed God," in the December 21-28, 2015 issue.

Benjamin J. Wilson, a product of Jesuit and Holy Cross education, works at the University of Notre Dame's Center for Social Concerns as an assistant director of the Summer Service Learning Program, an eight-week summer domestic service immersion program within a three-credit theology course.

Correction, Dec. 14, 2015

A previous version of this article stated incorrectly that Benjamin J. Wilson attended The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. The author earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at the University of Notre Dame.

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